Thanks for the comments. Yeah feedback is definitely not clear to the player. It also doesn't help that the sprites aren't at 1:1 scale. I will think on ideas of conveying what the input is actually parsing to the screen. It may need some sophisticated system to perhaps build visual components of the face into the speech bubble.

This looks really nice, and it's a cool idea with a nice story! I just brute forced my way through it, though - perhaps audio and/or visual feedback for what key presses the player is making would help?